Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineer and Signal Corps

The Artillery Museum is one of Russia's largest military-historical collections, housed in the kronwerk building of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The institution's full modern name reflects three areas of its holdings: artillery, engineer troops, and signal corps. The origins of the collection date back to the time of Peter the Great: in 1702 the tsar ordered that military relics be preserved, and a year later decreed that an old mortar made by master gunsmith Andrei Chokhov, cast in the early seventeenth century for the Moscow Arsenal, be kept safe. The nominal founding date is considered to be 1703, when an arsenal (zeikhgauz) appeared in the capital. In 1776 Count Grigory Orlov erected an arsenal building on Liteiny Prospekt with a "Memorable Hall" — a repository of rare military items; by the mid-nineteenth century the collection already numbered over ten thousand objects. The present building on the kronwerk was constructed in 1851–1860 by the architect Pyotr Tamansky, following a design approved by Nicholas I; from 1868 it became home to the collection, which was called at various times the Hall of Memorable Things, the Artillery Hall, and, from 1903, the Artillery Historical Museum. Count Pyotr Shuvalov played a significant role in expanding the collection, and from 1872 Nikolai Brandenburg oversaw the collection for nearly twenty years. By the early twentieth century the institution had become the principal repository of the Russian army's military history, comprising five departments. The Revolution took a heavy toll on the collection: in the autumn of 1917 most of the holdings were evacuated to Yaroslavl, and during the anti-Soviet uprising in the summer of 1918, crates of banners and blades were burned, trophies from the past war were lost, along with part of the archive. In 1924 the grounds were flooded after a hurricane, as a result of which the most valuable archaeological finds were transferred to the Hermitage. During the siege, part of the collection was evacuated to Novosibirsk, while the remaining staff organized exhibitions in hospitals and put out incendiary bombs in the museum courtyard. In the 1960s the collection was joined by the holdings of the military engineering collection and the signal corps repository — hence the institution's current name. Today the exhibition occupies thirteen halls arranged chronologically, and the collection numbers more than 850,000 items — from edged weapons of earlier centuries to 1940s equipment and postwar missile systems. Exhibits include captured Swedish- and French-cast cannons, guns made by Chokhov, and small arms and artillery equipment from wartime. After renovations in 2002, more than 250 artillery systems, self-propelled guns, and tanks were put on display in the courtyard. In front of the building stand a memorial marker to the Decembrists executed here, a bust of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, and a monument to weapons designer Mikhail Kalashnikov.